So much QQ, you'll need a flotation device.

The Selfish Theory of Selflessness

There are three types of talents. Talents that buff only you and your performance, talents that buff only somebody else and their performance, and talents that do both.

Take Improved Fireball. This talent only improves your own performance, having zero effect on anyone else.

Improved Scorch, on the other hand, provides a very powerful buff to everyone else. The mage does benefit from the debuff, too, but there isn’t anything about the talent that is pure selfishness. In fact, it actually lowers the mage’s DPS to keep the debuff up.

Focus Magic is something in the middle. The buffee gets a 3% crit boost, and so does the buffer.

There have been and still are many buffs that are selfless in nature, but most of them have quietly evolved to have a selfish portion to them anyways.

Improved Mark of the Wild, for instance. The talent used to increase the strength of Mark of the Wild. While this did provide a little bit of a buff for the druid, the talent’s main purpose was to buff everyone else. Now, in addition to boosting the effect of MotW, it will also give the druid a permanent 1/2% boost to all of their stats.

Selfish and selfless.

Another example is Hunting Party. As it is on the live servers, it allows the hunter to provide the Replenishment buff to their allies. Again, this has a little buff for the hunter (they can use Replenishment), but also again, the talent’s primary purpose is to assist others.

On the PTR, the talent is being changed to boost the hunter’s agility, in addition to providing the Replenishment buff.

Selfish and selfless.

Enduring Winter currently functions the same way. In addition to providing Replenishment, it boosts the mage’s elemental’s uptime, thus producing higher DPS.

Of those three types of talents, the type that buffs up others is being phased completely. The goal seems to be that Blizzard is aiming to have the talents arranged in such a way that the player isn’t gimping themselves to gain a selfless talent that provides nothing for themselves.

Top DPS Survival hunters, for instance, took zero points in Hunting Party as it only provided for others, and never themselves. With the talent points they saved, they could then invest them in further DPS talents.

In other words, these players could sacrifice some DPS to gain some utility, or screw the utility for superior damage output.

What started to happen in high end raids was apparently enough to cause consternation at Blizzard.

Take a raid with three Survival hunters. One of them needs to have Replenishment, but only one of them. Therefore, the other two would be able to skip the talent entirely, pick up other DPS talents and have better DPS because of it.

Meanwhile, whichever poor sod drew the short stick gets relegated to a subpar position on the damage meter because of the utility talent.

High end mages have always had a similar issue. If there are three fire mages in a raid, only one of them will use Scorch. Indeed, only one of them need ever spend three talent points on Imp. Scorch.

The others are free to spend talent points elsewhere to increase their personal DPS, and because they never have to cast Scorch, their DPS will always be better than the poor guy who has to keep Scorching.

So the master plan is to add a selfish component to every selfless talent. A SV hunter who invests points in Hunting Party will also receive a 1% boost to their Agility every rank. It isn’t much, but it’s something so that they aren’t completely screwing themselves on the damage meters.

All this is basically a round-a-bout way of saying that utility is rapidly becoming an excuse for less damage, not a reason. Blizzard themselves even stated this, repeatedly, during LK development.

Why is it still a DPS loss to use Scorch? Why does Improved Scorch continue to offer the mage nothing? Why does Winter’s Chill continue to offer the mage nothing?

Sort of related, why does the arcane tree not have a way to offer the crit debuff?

Arcane is the most selfish tree in the game. It relies extremely heavily on outside buffs, offering basically nothing in return. It can offer 3% crit to one other caster, and even that is just a clever ploy to give the mage even more crit.

There really isn’t such a thing as a clearcut utility class anymore. There are still distinctions between tank/healer/DPS, but the line between a utility class and a pure class has all but disappeared.

To look at it pragmatically, mages have always offered their raids/parties out of combat mana regeneration and transportation at the end.

More recently, mages offered one of the most powerful offensive caster debuffs in the game, and mages even offer Replenishment now.

If raid leaders are truly stupid enough to fixate on Recount reports and overlook the contribution of Replenishment and Scorch—if players are truly stupid enough to screw over the group for the personal glory of seeing bigger numbers—if people forget that it’s a team effort, that numbers can’t tell the whole story, and that what really matters at the end of the day is whether or not the boss fell, not your 6k dps—they deserve whatever drama they get.

If someone looks down in the kitty Druid who stops DPS for five seconds to Rebirth and Innervate a healer and save the raid, or the Mage who slaps CC on a loose mob, or the Retadin who holds back while Salving the Hunter so he can go all out … he’s a moron. Why would talent point assignments, and the resultant loss of DPS, be any different?

I’ve never understood why they didn’t swap out the Improved Scorch debuff to a stacking debuff applied by a spell that is already in your rotation. Winters Chill stacks from spamming Frostbolt which is pretty much all a raiding Frost Mage casts anyway, causing them to do nothing out of the ordinary.. why are Fire Mages forced to lower their DPS AND add another spell in to their rotation (outside of their primary spammable spell, living bomb and pyroblast for hot streak procs)? Just doesn’t seem logical to me.

I just got finished arguing that we need an in-game damage meter that credits the guy who provided the buff/debuff with whatever added damage it allows the raid to cause. That said, I’m not convinced that the way to go is to give everyone some selfless buff – at that point, you might as well just take all the buffs out of the game and raise everyone’s DPS by a corresponding percent. Either way you slice it, the challenge is figuring out what the percent is.

This reminds me of sports, with all those ‘contributions that don’t show up on the stats’, such as defensive stops, clutch performance, and the likes, and with the tendency to favor the individual performance over the team performance in many cases, since it’s the individual’s performance that determines worth and salary.

After all, at least with healing and DPS, often people ask “How much?” rather than looking at a person’s overall performance, since the number is easier to generate and examine. Worse yet, those numbers are often the hiring criteria used in Pick Up situations, given the lack of other, more complete ways to determine the potential value of a character.

Given the need for expediency in determining the qualifications of a player in WoW, and the lack of tracking ability for many of the non-numerical contributions, the mentality has become an “I need to get my numbers up” mentaility, because that gives players the best chance of moving up and/or rating their performance against others around them. Though I agree that raid buffers should gain some credit for providing the buff, I would also keep in mind that the skill of the buffed player ALSO determines the amount of benefit gained from the buff. So, an unskilled player and a skilled player buffing the same target player would provide the same amount of benefit to the group, since there is no interaction with the buff itself once it is placed, and that whether the DPS is adjusted for the buff or not, the player’s skill does not necessarily equal the player’s contribution, when used to compare characters.